You don't know anything about music

As I wander just a bit farther down my path, these last steps.....

.... have me recognizing that I may have fallen out of touch with how to appreciate music and what music's all about. You see, I think I have a feel for, and an understanding of, most genres of music. I also think that I have a qualified ear for determining good music from bad (at least, according to my taste). I can point out a familiar song from a chorus, harmony, melody, or sometimes, from just a chord. In a way, I'd say I'm in-tune with the musical hum of the planet; and no new music slips by without my notice.

But, the other day, I realized I might be 'sleep walking' through my musical experiences.

I'm unsure if the trigger was a new phone app that allowed me to read the real-time lyrics of a playing song, or if it was a friend forcing a pair headphones on me (and the world of musical bliss they invoke); but, something somewhere, along my wandering path, made me acknowledge that I might just be selling myself short; REAL short.  

You see, I know most of the words to most my favorite songs. And I admit that I sing along to many of them. But in this singing, I am shutting off my ability to take in the nuances of the song. I may not know the correct lyrics, or I may have a preconceived, incorrect notion of what the artist is trying to convey. Either way, I am doing myself a huge disservice by not experiencing each moment in music and by not feeling what the message is for me this day.

For, as the immortal American writer, Henry David Thoreau, brought to light in his renowned classic, Walden, more than 150 years ago:

"Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to."

This quote refers to how people read; but the lesson applies to how we listen, as well. I, for one, have not been standing on tiptoe to listen, nor devoting my most alert and wakeful hours to getting the most out of my exchanges with  music. My new mission is to engage the limitless expressions of music and to experience them more fully when I listen; even those pieces I think I know inside and out.

'Cause if I don't, I prove I don't know anything about music.